ENERGY AND EQUITY
From: Ivan Illich: _Toward a History of Needs_.
New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Ivan Illich
``El socialismo puede llegar s\'olo en bicicleta.''
Jos\'e Antonio Viera-Gallo
Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende
This text was first published in _Le Monde_ in early 1973. Over lunch
in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my
manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little
known and as technical as ``energy crisis'' had no place in the
opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As
I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language
and issues have shifted in less than five years. But I am equally
struck by the slow yet steady pace at which the radical alternative to
industrial society---namely, low-energy, convivial modernity---has
gained defenders.
In this essay I argue that under some circumstances, a technology
incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to
such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which
applies that technology. The material structure of production devices
can thus irremediably incorporate class prejudice. High-energy
technology, at least as applied to traffic, provides a clear
example. Obviously, this thesis undermines the legitimacy of those
professionals who monopolize the operation of such technologies. It is
particularly irksome to those individuals within the professions who
seek to serve the public by using the rhetoric of class struggle with
the aim of replacing the ``capitalists'' who now control institutional
policy by professional peers and laymen who accept professional
standards Mainly under the influence of such ``radical''
professionals, this thesis has, in only five years, changed from an
oddity into a heresy that has provoked a barrage of abuse.
The distinction proposed here, however, is not new. I oppose tools
that can be applied in the generation of use-values to others that
cannot be used except in the production of commodities This
distinction has recently been re-emphasized by a great variety of
social critics The insistence on the need for a balance between
_convivial_ and _industrial_ tools is, in fact, the common distinctive
element in an emerging consensus among groups engaged in radical
politics A superb guide to the bibliography in this field has been
published in _Radical Technology_ (London and New York, 1976), by the
editors of _Undercurrents_. I have transferred my own files on the
theme to Valentina Borremans, who is now working on a librarians'
guide to reference materials on use-value-oriented modern tools,
scheduled for publication in 1978. (Preliminary drafts of individual
chapters of this guide can be obtained by writing to Valentina
Borremans, APDO 479, Cuernavaca, Mexico.) The specific argument on
socially critical energy thresholds in transportation that I pursue in
this essay has been elaborated and documented by two colleagues,
Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert, in their two jointly written books,
_La Trahison de l'opulence_ (Paris, 1976) and _Les Chronophages_
(Paris, 1978).
THE ENERGY CRISIS
It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy
crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates
an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit
of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that
machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve
this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify
the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of
energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the
physical milieu.
The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate
a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into
perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to
master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do
most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a
society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone
to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned
to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic
ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity,
harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious
hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The
energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these
slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.
The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine
the range and character of social relationships a society will be able
to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide
choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society
opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be
dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled
capitalist or socialist.
At this moment, most societies---especially the poor ones---are still
free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines.
Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy
use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least
possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of
society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce
and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would
emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic
thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public
expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the
emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely
discussed.
The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have
begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as
a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use
of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social
orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on
energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high
levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the
only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only
strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the
power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy
postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates
the conditions for rational technology.
What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow
concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage,
motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this
threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy
affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that
energy.
The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea
for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which
equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least
under some ideal political conditions. Laboring under this illusion,
we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy
consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that nonmetabolic
power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a
certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social
disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold
at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in
horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be
theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the
per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.
Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of
energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is
physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose
between Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its
addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no
society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger
numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously
active.
In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of
per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total
output and become the major institutional activity within an
economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social
workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and
salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the
military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why
increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue
that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political
system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the
critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the
abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of
personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social
order.
I will argue here that technocracy must prevail as soon as the ratio
of mechanical power to metabolic energy oversteps a definite,
identifiable threshold. The order of magnitude within which this
threshold lies is largely independent of the level of technology
applied, yet its very existence has slipped into the blind-spot of
social imagination in both rich and medium-rich countries. Both the
United States and Mexico have passed the critical divide. In both
countries, further energy inputs increase inequality, inefficiency,
and personal impotence. Although one country has a per capita income
of $500 and the other, one of nearly $5,000, huge vested interest
in an industrial infrastructure prods both of them to further escalate
the use of energy. As a result, both North American and Mexican
ideologues put the label of ``energy crisis'' on their frustration,
and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social
breakdown is due neither to a shortage of fuel nor to the wasteful,
polluting, and irrational use of available wattage, but to the attempt
of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably
degrade, deprive, and frustrate most people.
A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its
tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to
confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening
diet. The per capita wattage that is critical for social well-being
lies within an order of magnitude which is far above the horsepower
known to four-fifths of humanity and far below the power commanded by
any Volkswagen driver. It eludes the underconsumer and the
overconsumer alike. Neither is willing to face the facts. For the
primitive, the elimination of slavery and drudgery depends on the
introduction of appropriate modern technology, and for the rich, the
avoidance of an even more horrible degradation depends on the
effective recognition of a threshold in energy consumption beyond
which technical processes begin to dictate social relations. Calories
are both biologically and socially healthy only as long as they stay
within the narrow range that separates enough from too much.
The so-called energy crisis is, then, a politically ambiguous issue.
Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distribution of
controls over the use of energy can lead in two opposite directions.
On the one hand, questions can be posed that would open the way to
political reconstruction by unblocking the search for a
postindustrial, labor-intensive, low-energy and high-equity economy.
On the other hand, hysterical concern with machine fodder can
reinforce the present escalation of capital-intensive institutional
growth, and carry us past the last turnoff from a hyperindustrial
Armageddon. Political reconstruction presupposes the recognition of
the fact that there exist _critical per capita quanta_ beyond
which energy can no longer be controlled by political process. A
universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of
ecological restraints on _total energy use_ imposed by
industrial-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at
some hypothetical maximum.
Rich countries like the United States, Japan, or France might never
reach the point of choking on their own waste, but only because their
societies will have already collapsed into a sociocultural energy
coma. Countries like India, Burma, and, for another short while at
least, China are in the inverse position of being still muscle-powered
enough to stop short of an energy stroke. They could choose, right
now, to stay within those limits to which the rich will be forced back
through a total loss of their freedoms.
The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon
fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested
interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of
man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated
hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by
industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for
raising the taxes that will be needed to substitute new, more
``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those
that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the
leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of
industrialization, the energy crisis serves as a _historical
imperative_ to centralize production, pollution, and their control
in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By
exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan
energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did
by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a
poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully
managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country
locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial
outputs. Inevitably the poor lose the option for rational technology
when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their
dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor deny themselves the
possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when,
together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum
feasible social control.
The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can
only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on
the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this
purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which
energy corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates
the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research
runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall
continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First,
the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be
theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must
be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally,
each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and
operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in
exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices
and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their
operation.
The need for political research on socially optimal energy quanta can
be clearly and concisely illustrated by an examination of modern
traffic. The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its
total energy (depending upon how one calculates this) into vehicles:
to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they
roll, when they fly, and when they park. Most of this energy is to
move people who have been strapped into place. For the sole purpose of
transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is
used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes. Almost all
of this fuel is burned in a rain-dance of time-consuming
acceleration. Poor countries spend less energy per person, but the
percentage of total energy devoted to traffic in Mexico or in Peru is
probably greater than in the United States, and it benefits a smaller
percentage of the population. The size of this enterprise makes it
both easy and significant to demonstrate the existence of socially
critical energy quanta by the example of personal mobility.
In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power)
translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear
as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic
pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once
some public utility went faster than 15 mph, equity declined and the
scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation
monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit. In every Western
country, passenger mileage on all types of conveyance increased by a
factor of a hundred within fifty years of building the first railroad.
When the ratio of their respective power outputs passed beyond a
certain value, mechanical transformers of mineral fuels excluded
people from the use of their metabolic energy and forced them to
become captive consumers of conveyance. This effect of speed on the
autonomy of people is only marginally affected by the technological
characteristics of the motorized vehicles employed or by the persons
or entities who hold the legal titles to airlines, buses, railroads,
or cars. High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation
socially destructive. A true choice among practical policies and of
desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained.
Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people
must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a
bicycle.\footnote{I speak about traffic for the purpose of
illustrating the more general point of socially optimal energy use,
and I restrict myself to the locomotion of persons, including their
personal baggage and the fuel, materials, and equipment used for the
vehicle and the road. I purposely abstain from the discussion of two
other types of traffic: merchandise and messages. A parallel
argument can be made for both, but this would require a different
line of reasoning, and I leave it for another occasion.
[_Author's Note:_ This note appeared in the original text. I was
then preparing two studies that were to complement this text: one on
the history of mail delivery, the other on crews and loads
throughout history. I renounced both projects to write _Medical
Nemesis_.]}
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal
distinction between transport and transit as the two components of
traffic. By _traffic_ I mean any movement of people from one
place to another when they are outside their homes. By _transit_
I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by
_transport_, that mode of movement which relies on other sources
of energy. These energy sources will henceforth be mostly motors,
since animals compete fiercely with men for their food in an
overpopulated world, unless they are thistle eaters like donkeys and
camels.
As soon as people become tributaries of transport, not just when they
travel for several days, but also on their daily trips, the
contradictions between social justice and motorized power, between
effective movement and higher speed, between personal freedom and
engineered routing, become poignantly clear. Enforced dependence on
auto-mobile machines then denies a community of self-propelled people
just those values supposedly procured by improved transportation.
People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around
will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with
the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will
appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern
Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors-most
of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.
People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent
on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles
per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not
legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of
mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard
these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time
economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far
this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the
transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From
the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower
behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality among
men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined
routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the
speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become
transportation consumers on the daily loop that brings them back to
their home, a circuit which the United States Department of Commerce
calls a ``trip'' as opposed to the ``travel'' for which Americans
leave home equipped with a toothbrush.
More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people
move faster over a greater range in the course of every
day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to
drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to
work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal
enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of
pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their
existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to
travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders
both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip
farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering
from their trips.
In the United States, four-fifths of all man-hours on the road are
those of commuters and shoppers who hardly ever get into a plane,
while four-fifths of the mileage flown to conventions and resorts is
covered year after year by the same 1.5 per cent of the population,
usually those who are either well-to-do or professionally trained to
do good. The speedier the vehicle, the larger the subsidy it gets from
regressive taxation. Barely 0.2 per cent of the entire United States
population can engage in self-chosen air travel more than once a year,
and few other countries can support a jet set which is that large.
The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent
on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco
or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that
he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The
occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered
seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and
prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around
vehicles rather than around people. Man has evolved physically and
culturally together with his cosmic niche. What for animals is their
environment he has learned to make into his home. His
self-consciousness requires as its complement a life-space and a
life-time integrated by the pace at which he moves. If that
relationship is determined by the velocity of vehicles rather than by
the movement of people, man the architect is reduced to the status of
a mere commuter.
The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his
car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks
it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to
meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls,
insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking
hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure
does not take into account the time consumed by other activities
dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and
garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending
consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next
buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less
than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation
industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to
go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time
budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the
traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not
more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of
compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally
distributed by the transportation industry.
SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation
industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand,
driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the
distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few
miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to
the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right
place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes,
part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school
arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of
the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which
does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down
on the coast.
Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of
space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries,
however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the
transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new
geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference
between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces
are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore,
still not degraded by their dependence on them.
The product of the transportation industry is the _habitual
passenger_. He has been boosted out of the world in which people
still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at
the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the
exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the
cars, trains, buses, subways,and elevators that force him to cover an
average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path
within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his
feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and
poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the
privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is
cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If
he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist
who drives against the traffic. If he must pay for his car out of his
own pocket, he knows full well that the commanders of corporate fleets
send the fuel bill to the company and write off the rented car as a
business expense. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of
growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can
see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more
traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the
design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a
revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In
neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better
future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in
fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private
cars with equally rapid public transport.
The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based
overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and
time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost
the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted
to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social,
and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come
to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he
is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it
with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost
confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share
space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by
himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.
The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and
expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both
liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To ``gather'' for
him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that
political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system,
and in its absence is the result of access to the television
screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on
propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process
correlates to the power of transportation and communications
systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of
the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a
citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his
freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped
and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than
freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the
acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in
a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.
NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
Unchecked speed is expensive, and progressively fewer can afford
it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase
in the cost of propulsion and track construction and---most
dramatically---in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the
move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest
passenger, a world-wide class structure of speed capitalists is
created. The exchange-value of time becomes dominant, and this is
reflected in language: time is spent, saved, invested, wasted, and
employed. As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular
speed correlate inversely.
High speed capitalizes a few people's time at an enormous rate but,
paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all. In Bombay,
only a very few people own cars. They can reach a provincial capital
in one morning and make the trip once a week. Two generations ago,
this would have been a week-long trek once a year. They now spend more
time on more trips. But these same few also disrupt, with their cars,
the traffic flow of thousands of bicycles and pedicabs that move
through downtown Bombay at a rate of effective locomotion that is
still superior to that of downtown Paris, London, or New York. The
compounded, transport-related time expenditure within a society grows
much faster than the time economies made by a few people on their
speedy excursions. Traffic grows indefinitely with the availability of
high-speed transports. Beyond a critical threshold, the output of the
industrial complex established to move people costs a society more
time than it saves. The marginal utility of an increment in the speed
of a small number of people has for its price the growing marginal
disutility of this acceleration for the great majority.
Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another
to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that
his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower
one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other
people's time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for
effecting a net transfer of life-time. The degree of transfer is
measured in quanta of speed. This time grab despoils those who are
left behind, and since they are the majority, it raises ethical issues
of a more general nature than the lottery that assigns kidney dialysis
or organ transplants.
Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which
they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them
for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city
within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence
farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who
are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.
Contrary to what is often claimed, man's speed remained unchanged from
the Age of Cyrus to the Age of Steam. News did not travel more than a
hundred miles per day, no matter how the message was carried. Neither
the Inca's runners nor the Venetian galley, the Persian horseman, or
the mail coach on regular runs under Louis XIV broke the barrier.
Soldiers, explorers, merchants, and pilgrims moved at twenty miles per
day. In Val\'ery's words, Napoleon still had to move at Caesar's
slowness: _Napol\'eon va \`a la m\^eme lenteur que C\'esar._ The
emperor knew that ``public prosperity is measured by the income of the
coaches'': _On mesure la prosp\'erit\'e publique aux comptes des
diligences,_ but he could barely speed them up. Paris---Toulouse had
required about 200 hours in Roman times, and the scheduled stagecoach
still took 158 hours in 1740, before the opening of the new Royal
Roads. Only the nineteenth century accelerated man. By 1830, the trip
had been reduced to 110 hours, but at a new cost. In the same year,
4,150 stagecoaches overturned in France, causing more than a thousand
deaths. Then the railroad brought a sudden change. By 1855,
Napoleon~III claimed to have hit 96 kilometers per hour on the train
somewhere between Paris and Marseilles. Within one generation, the
average distance traveled each year per Frenchman increased one
hundred and thirty times, and Britain's railroad network reached its
greatest expansion. Passenger trains attained their optimum cost
calculated in terms of time spent for their maintenance and use.
With further acceleration, transportation began to dominate traffic,
and speed began to erect a hierarchy of destinations. By now, each set
of destinations corresponds to a specific level of speed and defines a
certain passenger class. Each circuit of terminal points degrades
those pegged at a lower number of miles per hour. Those who must get
around on their own power have been redefined as underdeveloped
outsiders. Tell me how fast you go and I'll tell you who you are. If
you can corner the taxes that fuel the Concorde, you are certainly at
the top.
Over the last two generations, the vehicle has become the sign of
career achievement, just as the school has become the sign of starting
advantage. At each new level, the concentration of power must produce
its own kind of rationale. So, for example, the reason that is usually
given for spending public money to make a man travel more miles in
less time each year is the still greater investment that was made to
keep him more years in school. His putative value as a
capital-intensive production tool sets the rate at which he is being
shipped. Other ideological labels besides ``a good education'' are
just as useful for opening the cabin door to luxuries paid for by
others. If the Thought of Chairman Mao must now be rushed around China
by jet, this can only mean that two classes are needed to fuel what
his revolution has become, one of them living in the geography of the
masses and the other in the geography of the cadres. The suppression
of intermediary levels of speed in the People's Republic has certainly
made the concentration of power more efficient and rational, but it
also underscores the new difference in value between the time of the
bullock driver and the time of the jet-driven. Acceleration inevitably
concentrates horsepower under the seats of a few and compounds the
increasing time lack of most commuters with the further sense that
they are lagging behind.
The need for unequal privilege in an industrial society is generally
advocated by means of an argument with two sides. The hypocrisy of
this argument is clearly betrayed by acceleration. Privilege is
accepted as the necessary precondition for improving the lot of a
growing total population, or it is advertised as the instrument for
raising the standards of a deprived minority. In the long run,
accelerating transportation does neither. It only creates a universal
demand for motorized conveyance and puts previously unimaginable
distances between the various layers of privilege. Beyond a certain
point, more energy means less equity.
THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a
different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by
levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and
pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society
may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the
rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of
leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for
himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget
on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only
tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a
self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion
under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed
limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a
condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society,
while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that
transportation claims.
There is little research available on the impact of vehicles on the
twenty-four-hour time budget of individuals and
societies.\footnote{Since publication of this text in 1973, much
research has been done and published. For a critical guide to the
literature see Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Roben, _Les
Chronophages_ (Paris, 1977).} From transportation studies, we
get statistics on the cost of time per mile, on the value of time
measured in dollars or in length of trips. But these statistics tell
us nothing about the hidden costs of transportation: about how traffic
nibbles away at lifetime, about how vehicles devour space, about the
multiplication of trips made necessary by the existence of vehicles,
or about the time spent directly and indirectly preparing for
locomotion. Further, there is no available measure of the even more
deeply buried costs of transport, such as higher rent to live in areas
convenient to the flow of traffic, or the cost of protecting these
areas from the noise, pollution, and danger to life and limb that
vehicles create. The lack of an account of expenditures from the
social time budget should not lead us to believe, however, that such
an accounting is impossible, nor should it prevent our drawing
conclusions from the little that we do know.
From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world,
after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity
related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this
threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of
waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on
his own but must attain within the day. By now, people work a
substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they
could not even get to work. The time a society spends on
transportation grows in proportion to the speed of its fastest public
conveyance. Japan now leads the United States in both areas. Life-time
gets cluttered up with activities generated by traffic as soon as
vehicles crash through the barrier that guards people from dislocation
and space from distortion.
Whether the vehicle that speeds along the public freeway is owned by
the state or by an individual has little to do with the time scarcity
and overprogramming that rise with every increment in speed. Buses use
one-third of the fuel that cars burn to carry one man over a given
distance. Commuter trains are up to ten times more efficient than
cars. Both could become even more efficient and less polluting. If
publicly owned and rationally managed, they could be so scheduled and
routed that the privileges they now provide under private ownership
and incompetent organization would be considerably cut. But as long as
any system of vehicles imposes itself on the public by top speeds that
are not under political control, the public is left to choose between
spending more time to pay for more people to be carried from station
to station, and paying less taxes so that even fewer people can travel
in much less time much farther than others. The order of magnitude of
the top speed that is permitted within a transportation system
determines the slice of its time budget that an entire society spends
on traffic.
THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully
discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered
transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each
component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I
have called traffic.
Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and
transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product
of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial
commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport
always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more
severe as the speed---and with it the cost---of the service
increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the
form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best,
such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner's Dilemma: by
cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time
in the cell.
Transit is not the product of an industry but the independent
enterprise of transients. It has use-value by definition but need not
have any exchange-value. The ability to engage in transit is native to
man and more or less equally distributed among healthy people of the
same age. The exercise of this ability can be restricted by depriving
some class of people of the right to take a straight route, or because
a population lacks shoes or pavements. Conflict about unsatisfactory
transit conditions tends to take, therefore, the form of a
non-zero-sum game in which everyone comes out ahead-not only the
people who get the right to walk through a formerly walled property,
but also those who live along the road.
Total traffic is the result of two profoundly distinct modes of
production. These can reinforce each other harmoniously only as long
as the autonomous outputs are protected against the encroachment of
the industrial product.
The harm done by contemporary traffic is due to the monopoly of
transport. The allure of speed has deceived the passenger into
accepting the promises made by an industry that produces
capital-intensive traffic. He is convinced that high-speed vehicles
have allowed him to progress beyond the limited autonomy he enjoyed
when moving under his own power. He has allowed planned transport to
predominate over the alternative of labor intensive
transit. Destruction of the physical environment is the least noxious
effect of this concession. The far more bitter results are the
multiplication of psychic frustration, the growing disutilities of
continued production, and subjection to an inequitable transfer of
power-all of which are manifestations of a distorted relationship
between life-time and life-space. The passenger who agrees to live in
a world monopolized by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened
consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control.
Every society that imposes compulsory speed submerges transit to the
profit of transport. Wherever not only privilege but also elementary
necessities are denied to those who do not use high-speed conveyances,
an involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms is imposed. Industry
dominates traffic as soon as daily life comes to depend on motorized
trips.
This profound control of the transportation industry over natural
mobility constitutes a monopoly much more pervasive than either the
commercial monopoly Ford might win over the automobile market, or the
political monopoly car manufacturers might wield against the
development of trains and buses. Because of its hidden, entrenched,
and structuring nature, I call this a _radical monopoly_. Any
industry exercises this kind of deep-seated monopoly when it becomes
the dominant means of satisfying needs that formerly occasioned a
personal response. The compulsory consumption of a high-powered
commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying
an abundant use-value (the innate capacity for transit). Traffic
serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: _Any
industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given
intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a
need._ Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the
environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the
nontherapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic.
Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society
for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta; then it
is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which
the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on
a different appearance in industrial branches where information
dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those
branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such
as housing, clothing, or transport. The industrial packaging of values
will reach critical intensity at different points with different
products, but for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs
within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The
fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed
within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic
does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how
much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that
it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which
learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to
identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labor that
a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to
political process can lead to the specific, though provisional,
measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be
limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a
matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be
pinpointed by social analysis.
A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole
society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or by
driving competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of
its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can
satisfy.
Shoes are scarce all over Latin America, and many people never wear
them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world's
widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of
artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of
shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to
be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and public services was
denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of
shoes as a sign of indifference toward ``progress.'' Without any
intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development
and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred
from any office.
Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all times. But it was never
the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an
obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools
both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny
learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational
therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it
become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex
artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do
not fit.
The potential of a radical monopoly is unmistakable in the case of
traffic. Imagine what would happen if the transportation industry
could somehow distribute its output more adequately: a traffic utopia
of _free rapid_ transportation for all would inevitably lead to
a further expansion of traffic's domain over human life. What would
such a utopia look like? Traffic would be organized exclusively around
public transportation systems. It would be financed by a progressive
tax calculated on income and on the proximity of one's residence to
the next terminal and to the job. It would be designed so that
everybody could occupy any seat on a first-come, first-served basis:
the doctor, the vacationer, and the president would not be assigned
any priority of person. In this fool's paradise, all passengers would
be equal, but they would be just as equally captive consumers of
transport. Each citizen of a motorized utopia would be equally
deprived of the use of his feet and equally drafted into the servitude
of proliferating networks of transportation.
Certain would-be miracle makers disguised as architects offer a
specious escape from the paradox of speed. By their standards,
acceleration imposes inequities, time loss, and controlled schedules
only because people do not yet live in those patterns and orbits into
which vehicles can best place them. These futuristic architects would
house and occupy people in self-sufficient units of towers
interconnected by tracks for high-speed capsules. Soleri, Doxiadis, or
Fuller would solve the problem created by high-speed transport by
identifying the entire human habitat with the problem. Rather than
asking how the earth's surface can be preserved for people, they ask
how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be
established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of
industrial outputs.
THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
Paradoxically, the concept of a traffic-optimal top speed for
transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger,
whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver.
Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold
too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger
and too high to convey the sense of a _limit_ to the
three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power.
All those who plan, finance, or engineer other people's housing,
transportation, or education belong to the passenger class. Their
claim to power is derived from the value their employers place on
acceleration. Social scientists can build a computer model of traffic
in Calcutta or Santiago, and engineers can design monorail webs
according to abstract notions of traffic flow. Since these planners
are true believers in problem-solving by industrial design, the real
solution for traffic congestion is beyond their grasp. Their belief in
the effectiveness of power blinds them to the disproportionately
greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use. Traffic engineers
have yet to combine in one simulation model the mobility of people
with that of vehicles. The _transportation_ engineer cannot
conceive of the possibility of renouncing speed and slowing down for
the sake of permitting time-and-destination-optimal _traffic_
flow. He would never entertain the thought of programming his computer
on the stipulation that no motorized vehicle within any city should
ever overtake the speed of a velocipede. The development expert who
looks down compassionately from his Land-Rover on the Indian peasant
herding his pigs to market refuses to acknowledge the relative
advantage of feet. The expert tends to forget that this man has
dispensed ten others in his village from spending time on the road,
whereas the engineer and every member of his family separately devote
a major part of every day to transportation. For a man who believes
that human mobility must be conceived in terms of indefinite progress,
there can be no optimal level of traffic but only passing consensus on
a given technical level of transportation.
Most Mexicans, not to speak of Indians and Chinese, are in a position
inverse to that of the confirmed passenger. The critical threshold is
entirely beyond what all but a few of them know or expect. They still
belong to the class of the self-powered. Some of them have a lingering
memory of a motorized adventure, but most of them have no personal
experience of traveling at or above the critical speed. In the two
typical Mexican states of Guerrero and Chiapas, less than one per cent
of the population moved even once over ten miles in less than one hour
during 1970. The vehicles into which people in these areas are
sometimes crowded render traffic indeed more convenient, but barely
faster than the speed of a bicycle. The third-class bus does not
separate the farmer from his pig, and it takes them both to market
without inflicting any loss of weight, but this acquaintance with
motorized ``comfort'' does not amount to dependence on destructive
speed.
The order of magnitude in which the critical threshold of speed can be
found is too low to be taken seriously by the passenger, and too high
to concern the peasant. It is so obvious it cannot be easily seen. The
proposal of a limit to speed within this order of magnitude engenders
stubborn opposition. It exposes the addiction of industrialized men to
ever higher doses of energy, while it asks those who are still sober
to abstain from something they have yet to taste.
To propose counterfoil research is not only a scandal, it is also a
threat. Simplicity threatens the expert, who supposedly understands
just why the commuter train runs at 8:15 and 8:41 and why it must be
better to use fuel with certain additives. That a political process
could identify a _natural_ dimension, both inescapable and
limited, is an idea that lies outside the passenger's world of
verities. He has let respect for specialists he does not even know
turn into unthinking submission. If a political resolution could be
found for problems created by experts in the field of traffic, then
perhaps the same remedy could be applied to problems of education,
medicine, or urbanization. If the order of magnitude of
traffic-optimal vehicular velocities could be determined by laymen
actively participating in an ongoing political process, then the
foundation on which the framework of every industrial society is built
would be shattered. To propose such research is politically
subversive. It calls in question the overarching consensus on the need
for more transportation which now allows the proponents of public
ownership to define themselves as political adversaries of the
proponents of private enterprise.
DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the
coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a
well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man
could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The
ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the
wheel---probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions---finally
to become useful for self-powered mobility.
Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries
one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending
0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient
than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he
performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses
or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made
its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent
and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time
budgets outside the home or the encampment.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the
pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries
one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of
only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match
man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with
this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but
all other animals as well.
The invention of the ball-bearing, the tangent-spoked wheel, and the
pneumatic tire taken together can be compared to only three other
events in the history of transportation. The invention of the wheel at
the dawn of civilization took the load off man's back and put it onto
the barrow. The invention and simultaneous application, during the
European Middle Ages, of stirrup, shoulder harness, and horseshoe
increased the thermodynamic efficiency of the horse by a factor of up
to five, and changed the economy of medieval Europe: it made frequent
plowing possible and thus introduced rotation agriculture; it brought
more distant fields into the reach of the peasant, and thus permitted
landowners to move from six-family hamlets into one-hundred family
villages, where they could live around the church, the square, the
jail, and-later-the school; it allowed the cultivation of northern
soils and shifted the center of power into cold climates. The building
of the first oceangoing vessels by the Portuguese in the fifteenth
century, under the aegis of developing European capitalism, laid the
solid foundations for a globe-spanning culture and market.
The invention of the ball-bearing signaled a fourth revolution. This
revolution was unlike that, supported by the stirrup, which raised the
knight onto his horse, and unlike that, supported by the galleon,
which enlarged the horizon of the king's captains. The ball-bearing
signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option
between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an
equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion,
respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted
man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is
theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual
capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively
paralyzing speed.
The monopoly of a ritual application over a potentially useful device
is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, the wheel took the load off
the carrier slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian land mass. In
Mexico, the wheel was well known, but never applied to transport. It
served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods. The
taboo on wheelbarrows in America before Cortes is no more puzzling
than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic.
It is by no means necessary that the invention of the ball bearing
continue to serve the increase of energy use and thereby produce time
scarcity, space consumption, and class privilege. If the new order of
self-powered mobility offered by the bicycle were protected against
devaluation, paralysis, and risk to the limbs of the rider, it would
be possible to guarantee optimal shared mobility to all people and put
an end to the imposition of maximum privilege and exploitation. It
would be possible to control the patterns of urbanization if the
organization of space were constrained by the power man has to move
through it.
Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also
cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable
bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the
purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed
to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure
tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price
differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle
system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense
traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not
thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on
cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting
him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can
usually push it.
The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in
the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space
devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size
to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated
trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars,
and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these
vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to
door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his
choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is
barred.
Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up
significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend
fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They
can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting
undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become
masters of their own movements without blocking those of their
fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also
satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on
space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows
people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their
life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being,
without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern
self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic
runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to
pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the
evidence for their claim.
A grisly contest between bicycles and motors is just coming to an
end. In Vietnam, a hyperindustrialized army tried to conquer, but
could not overcome, a people organized around bicycle speed. The
lesson should be clear. High-energy armies can annihilate people-both
those they defend and those against whom they are launched-but they
are of very limited use to a people which defends itself. It remains
to be seen if the Vietnamese will apply what they learned in war to an
economy of peace, if they will be willing to protect the values that
made their victory possible. The dismal likelihood is that the
victors, for the sake of industrial progress and increased energy
consumption, will tend to defeat themselves by destroying that
structure of equity, rationality, and autonomy into which American
bombers forced them by depriving them of fuels, motors, and roads.
DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks
for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to
go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand
the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be
irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is
denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a
passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a
person's native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of
transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just
because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into
ideological seat belts. Man's natural capacity for transit emerges as
the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can
make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can
bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of
transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it.
Transportation can abridge traffic in three ways: by breaking its
flow, by creating isolated sets of destinations, and by increasing the
loss of time due to traffic. I have already argued that the key to the
relation between transport and traffic is the speed of vehicles. I
have described how, past a certain threshold of speed, transport has
gone on to obstruct traffic in these three ways. It blocks mobility by
cluttering up the environment with vehicles and roads. It transforms
geography into a pyramid of circuits sealed off from one another
according to levels of acceleration. It expropriates life-time at the
behest of speed.
If beyond a certain threshold transport obstructs traffic, the inverse
is also true: below some level of speed, motorized vehicles can
complement or improve traffic by permitting people to do things they
could not do on foot or on bicycle. A well-developed transportation
system running at top speeds of 25 mph would have allowed Fix to chase
Phileas Fogg around the world in less than half of eighty days. Motors
can be used to transport the sick, the lame, the old, and the just
plain lazy. Motor pulleys can lift people over hills, but they can do
so peacefully only if they do not push the climber off the
path. Trains can extend the range of travel, but can do so with
justice only if people have not only equal transportation but equal
free time to come closer to each other. The time engaged in travel
must be, as much as possible, the traveler's own: only insofar as
motorized transport remains limited to speeds which leave it
subsidiary to autonomous transit can a traffic-optimal transportation
system be developed.
A limit on the power and therefore on the speed of motors does not by
itself insure those who are weaker against exploitation by the rich
and powerful, who can still devise means to live and work at better
located addresses, travel with retinue in plush carriages, and reserve
a special lane for doctors and members of the central committee. But
at a sufficiently limited maximum speed, this is an unfairness which
can be reduced or even corrected by political means: by grassroots
control over taxes, routes, vehicles, and their schedules in the
community. At unlimited top speed neither public ownership of the
means of transportation nor technical improvements in their control
can ever eliminate growing and unequal exploitation. A transportation
industry is the key to optimal production of traffic, but only if it
does not exercise its radical monopoly over that personal mobility
which is intrinsically and primarily a value in use.
UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic
has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage
and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can
also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide
development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those
countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are
destructively overindustrialized.
A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each
citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus
for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it
cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public
transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel
for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or
ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated
anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a
people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its
will.
A country can be classified as overindustrialized when its social life
is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to
determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and
to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them.
Beyond underequipment and overindustrialization, there is a place for
the world of postindustrial effectiveness, where the industrial mode
of production complements other autonomous forms of production. There
is a place, in other words, for a world of technological maturity. In
terms of traffic, it is the world of those who have tripled the extent
of their daily horizon by lifting themselves onto their bicycles. It
is just as much the world marked by a variety of subsidiary motors
available for the occasions when a bicycle is not enough and when an
extra push will limit neither equity nor freedom. And it is, too, the
world of the long voyage: a world where every place is open to every
person, at his own pleasure and speed, without haste or fear, by means
of vehicles that cross distances without breaking with the earth which
man walked for hundreds of thousands of years on his own two feet.
Underequipment keeps people frustrated by inefficient labor and
invites the enslavement of man by man. Overindustrialization enslaves
people to the tools they worship, fattens professional hierarchs on
bits and on watts, and invites the translation of unequal power into
huge income differentials. It imposes the same net transfers of power
on the productive relations of every society, no matter what creed the
managers profess, no matter what rain-dance, what penitential ritual
they conduct. Technological maturity permits a society to steer a
course equally free of either enslavement. But beware---that course is
not charted. Technological maturity permits a variety of political
choices and cultures. The variety diminishes, of course, as a
community allows industry to grow at the cost of autonomous
production. Reasoning alone can offer no precise measure for the level
of postindustrial effectiveness and technological maturity appropriate
to a concrete society. It can only indicate in dimensional terms the
range into which these technological characteristics must fit. It must
be left to a historical community engaged in its own political process
to decide when programming, space distortion, time scarcity, and
inequality cease to be worth its while. Reasoning can identify speed
as the critical factor in traffic. Reasoning combined with
experimentation can identify the order of magnitude at which vehicular
speed turns into a sociopolitical determinant. No genius, no expert,
no club of elites can set limits to industrial outputs that will be
politically feasible. The need for such limits as an alternative to
disaster is the strongest argument in favor of radical technology.
Only when the speed limits of vehicles reflect the enlightened
self-interest of a political community can these limits become
operative. Obviously this interest cannot even be expressed in a
society where one class monopolizes not only transportation but
communication, medicine, education, and weapons as well. It does not
matter if this power is held by legal owners or by entrenched managers
of an industry that is legally owned by the workers. This power must
be reappropriated and submitted to the sound judgment of the common
man. The reconquest of power starts with the recognition that expert
knowledge blinds the secretive bureaucrat to the obvious way of
dissolving the energy crisis, just as it blinded him to the obvious
solution to the war in Vietnam.
There are two roads from where we are to technological maturity: one
is the road of liberation from affluence; the other is the road of
liberation from dependence. Both roads have the same destination: the
social restructuring of space that offers to each person the
constantly renewed experience that the center of the world is where he
stands, walks, and lives.
Liberation from affluence begins on the traffic islands where the rich
run into one another. The well-sped are tossed from one island to the
next and are offered but the company of fellow passengers en route to
somewhere else. This solitude of plenty would begin to break down as
the traffic islands gradually expanded and people began to recover
their native power to move around the place where they lived. Thus,
the impoverished environment of the traffic island could embody the
beginnings of social reconstruction, and the people who now call
themselves rich would break with bondage to overefficient transport on
the day they came to treasure the horizon of their traffic islands,
now fully grown, and to dread frequent shipments from their homes.
Liberation from dependence starts at the other end. It breaks the
constraints of village and valley and leads beyond the boredom of
narrow horizons and the stifling oppression of a world closed in on
itself. To expand life beyond the radius of tradition without
scattering it to the winds of acceleration is a goal that any poor
country could achieve within a few years, but it is a goal that will
be reached only by those who reject the offer of unchecked industrial
development made in the name of an ideology of indefinite energy
consumption.
Liberation from the radical monopoly of the transportation industry is
possible only through the institution of a political process that
demystifies and disestablishes speed and limits traffic-related public
expenditures of money, time, and space to the pursuit of equal mutual
access. Such a process amounts to public guardianship over a means of
production to keep this means from turning into a fetish for the
majority and an end for the few. The political process, in turn, will
never engage the support of a vast majority unless its goals are set
with reference to a standard that can be publicly and operationally
verified. The recognition of a socially critical threshold of the
energy quantum incorporated in a commodity, such as a passenger mile,
provides such a standard. A society that tolerates the transgression
of this threshold inevitably diverts its resources from the production
of means that can be shared equitably and transforms them into fuel
for a sacrificial flame that victimizes the majority. On the other
hand, a society that limits the top speed of its vehicles in
accordance with this threshold fulfills a necessary-though by no means
a sufficient-condition for the political pursuit of equity.
Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rich dear, but
they will pay its price once the acceleration of their transportation
systems grinds traffic to a halt. A concrete analysis of traffic
betrays the truth underlying the energy crisis: the impact of
industrially packaged quanta of energy on the social environment tends
to be degrading, exhausting, and enslaving, and these effects come
into play even before those which threaten the pollution of the
physical environment and the extinction of the race. The crucial point
at which these effects can be reversed is not, however, a matter of
deduction, but of decision.